Connie, is that the one where most of the "action" is Rodney teaching university after he comes home from Atlantis? I liked that one a lot, and it certainly wasn't happy but I'd call it more elegaic than tearjerking.

That's the one, chris, but I wept my way all through it.

For a moment there I thought I'd posted something that should have been spoiler-fonted.

It's not so much the summary that made me weep and wail, but just that it made me remember how painful Twist and Shout was/is:

What begins as a transforming love between Dean Winchester and Castiel Novak in the summer of 1965 quickly derails into something far more tumultuous when Dean is drafted in the Vietnam War. Though the two both voice their relationship is one where saying goodbye is never a real truth, their story becomes fraught with the tragedy of circumstance. In an era where homosexuality was especially vulnerable, Twist and Shout is the story of the love transcending time, returning over and over in its many forms, as faithful as the sea.

I'm curious about the story itself, Julie, beyond the summary. What is the shipwide sadface caused by?

Okay, so my really hazy summary would be: Dean and Cas meet, fall in love, life is hunky dory for the most part. Dean gets enlisted/volunteers for Vietnam. I don't know if they break up over this or if that comes later. Dean faces lots of homophobia in the military. When Dean comes back, he's kinda fucked up and broken, and it puts a strain on their relationship.Cas can't fix him, Dean doesn't want him to share his burden of horrors. They love each other desperately but things are strained, and I think Dean makes the choice to leave Castiel for his own good or something, completely cuts off contact. Years later, Dean is contacted to be informed that Cas is dying. Cas had apparently gotten involved with Balthazar, who might have been his gateway into partying hard. They break up, because Cas was never over Dean, and was fucked up by Dean leaving him, and Cas' partying gets too much for even Bal (I think) and Bal knows he'll never measure up to Dean. So, now we're in the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, and when Dean finally decides to see Cas, he's skin and bones and on his death bed. Cas' memory is going, they relive memories, Dean stays with him until he dies. And I think the dying took a long time.

It was not a happy fic. Not my beautiful cake. It made me cry a lot, but I didn't enjoy it. It made me miserable and angry.

Okay, cool, still untempted. I'm not sure I could cherry pick the good bits knowing all that was coming down the pike.

I'm so glad to hear others are reading Hollow Your Bones Like a Bird. I tend to restrict myself to Steve/Tony, just because I have too much to read already, but I love scifigrl47's stories beyond belief. I haven't read the last chapter yet, but it sounds like I better go do that ASAP.

I feel like I might have exhausted my ability to find new (good) Steve/Tony, but that can't be true, and I wonder if that's because the top google hits are mostly movie 'verse or 616 and I don't know any communities/accounts to watch. But I think I haven't yet plumbed the depths of Ults.

I love beginning stories. Pre-slash that ends in slash. Actually, my tastes for S/T and C/P are the same as for D/C: meet, bicker, fall in love, all amidst lots of violence and whump. Save the fluff for the timestamps.

Just finished a C/C "pre-slash" (it's totally gen) that dealt with mind-control in a completely new way that was really great. Couldn't for the life of me tell you what it was, except that it was long and spanned decades.

I tend to just go to AO3, search on my pairing and then sort by hit count. I won't say you always get the best fics, sometimes only the most popular for a particular trope, but it does help sort the wheat from the chaff.

Also, this is a fairly extensive rec list of longer S/T fics: [link] , but most of them have been around for a while so you've probably already found them.

I've currently got a Clint/Coulson most-recent search open from AO3 and I'm looking at stuff from the past few days. I generally search by word count and complete.